The Age When We Turn Into Our Parents

In Four Summers, Joyce Carol Oates depicts the same girl at four different ages during four different summers at the same lake and the same bar.  In the first three summers, the main character, Sissie, slowly hates the bar more and more.  Sissie has grown up watching her father get drunk, listening to her parents fight, and seeing her mother’s disdain for her own children and she seems to dislike all of it. 

After Sissie gets married she returns to the same tavern with her new husband and she is pregnant.  I would not have thought she would have wanted to return to that bar at all. While studying her husband, Jesse, she notes that “Jesse is young, but the outline of what he will be is already in his face…Their lives are like hands dealt out to them in their innumerable card games.” (56). When Sissie says “their” she is no longer just talking about Jesse but I assume her father as well.  When describing her father she says that “his jaws sag and there are lines in his neck-edged with dirt,” (51).  The assumption could be drawn that Jesse works in the same field as Sissie’s father and as Jesse ages he will become stressed with the job as well and it will show on his face.  Before Sissie’s father became so dependent on alcohol I would have thought he would have been like Jesse, young and in love with his new pregnant wife.  Similarities can also be drawn between pregnant Sissie and younger versions of Sissie’s mother in that they are both described as pretty when they were young. 

The environment that we grow up in shapes who we become.  No matter how much we dislike parts of our past we cannot get rid of them.  As humans we tend to stick with what is comfortable and familiar even if we hate it because we know that we can trust the outcome.  I predict that Jesse and Sissie will end up almost exactly like Sissie’s parents.  It is what they know adulthood to be like and it is what they will cling to as an example to shape their own adult lives.  Children who have parents who are alcoholics tend to have a higher chance of becoming an alcoholic themselves. Sissie, her parents and the rest of her family may not even realize that they are able to change the path their lives are on because it is all they know and it is all they have known.  In that sense we all grow up into the example that our parents left for us.